This is a very succinct dissection of the problems but I will add one more: PowerShell's frustrating behavior where any return value of a function call is part of the enclosing function's return value if not explicitly swallowed. I understand what they were going for by analogy with other shells here, but in my opinion in a language like PowerShell (with actual return values) this is unintuitive and makes it really easy to introduce bugs. The whole object pipeline thing they were going for feels like an evolutionary dead end that we shouldn't be saddled with.